Meeting Grace

This is Grace.

I met Grace whilst I was in Tanzania a bit over a week ago. We got together after I was teamed up to go help in the kitchen, basically all that kitchen duty was me and four other girls helping cut up some veggies but not actually doing any cooking. The kitchen also only consisted of a small hut with some chairs outside which were only placed there because we were doing the cutting up of veggies.

Grace, I am guessing, is one of the girls who regularly helps in the kitchen as she seems pretty confident in her role of what to do. She was sitting there with three other girls and they were chatting and giggling.

Grace stood out the most to me because she was the one who taught me how to cut onions ‘properly’.

It was nice to be able to sit with them, since the kitchen was a lot calmer than the other places on the school campus.

It was also nice because the girls were very kind. Whenever you did something ‘wrong’, like in my case not cutting the onions small enough, they would show what you did to each other and giggle about it, but it wasn't mean giggling over the fact that you did something wrong but rather to lighten the mood. Afterwards they would show you how to do it correctly.

It didn’t matter how many times you got it wrong, the girls would still be as kind as the first time and continue to show you how you had to do whatever you did wrong in that moment.

Another fact that really stood out to me whilst I was helping in the cooking process was that the girls in the kitchen didn’t just ‘steal’ your stuff.

Many of the children there were fascinated with the idea of wearing sunglasses in any kind of picture you took of them. Therefore most of the children would go ahead and grab your sunglasses, try them on and then maybe give them back to you on their own accord.

However the girls from the kitchen were different, there were a few times where they could have taken the sunglasses as they fell to the floor, yet they didn’t. They would only pick them up, maybe try them on, and then lay them on a chair near you so they couldn’t fall again and so that you wouldn’t lose them.

These acts of kindness really showed me the true character of these girls and what made them, and especially Grace, stand out to me the most whilst on my PDW trip to Tanzania.